Is this a toaster I see before me?

Published 3:45 pm, Thursday, September 26, 2013

We got a brand new toaster the other day, a Breville, a sleek, brushed-silver object with rounded edges. It looks like the toaster in the Home of the Future at the 1964 World's Fair. It even has a little elevator that raises and lowers your toast.

Press one button, and it all happens. Right this way, Mrs. Happy Homemaker, the future is now. Toast is nicely even, too, and efficiently toasted. There's even a "lift and look" button, so that nervous toast-makers can peek at the toast to make sure it's not too done.

I feel like we just bought the Rolls-Royce of toasters. My other appliances will have to measure up. Oops, they're not doing it.

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And I wondered, as I gazed down on the latest iteration of 21st century technology doing a 19th century job: Is this the last toaster I will ever own? Will I go to my grave not having experienced the next generation of toasters?

I think a lot of us in my age cohort are asking that question a lot. I mean, we can do the math - we can read the obits. We know how much time typically a man or a woman has left in the planet. We know that our bodies will decay eventually, and the name of the thing that carries us off won't matter so much.

And yet we are still very much in this world and of this world. It's just that occasionally we stop and wonder. Nothing important, because the important things require a whole other level of investigation. Just: toasters. Or refrigerators. Mattresses.

I got a new mattress recently. Given what I know about various timetables, mine and the mattress', I pretty much figure this is the last one, although there may be other mattresses in other buildings. I'm not looking forward to that bit.

Or we could throw it all over and move to Fiji. In which case, the mattress would go too cheaply on Craigslist. But probably not. Probably we are staying in the Bay Area. So probably the mattress stays with us. The toaster too.

It is interesting. In the midst of life there is death and all that - we know that. Those of us who have been to war know it more keenly. Those of us who lived through the early years of the AIDS epidemic know it more keenly. Those of us with tragic family circumstances know it more keenly. But it's still hard to fathom, the transition between lively and not lively.

A neighbor of mine died not so long ago. I knew him mostly to chat with at neighborhood gatherings. And then one day he wasn't there. I caught myself taking sneak peeks at his house, expecting to see him again, wanting to see him again. It does all seem like a cruel joke.

Where's your friend? Ha, ha, not there. That death - what a kidder.

I went to a funeral recently. It was a punk funeral, complete with a punk band to play the deceased into the afterlife. That meant that the person who died was younger than me. That's not supposed to happen. It's against the natural order of things.

Mr. "This Is Your Last Toaster" does not much care about the natural order of things. He is the natural order of things. We accept that. It's just that all the in-between bits threaten to be so dire. We'll need more than a new toaster to get us through.

Of course, I tend toward worst-case scenarios. So did my mother; we were united in considering unlikely catastrophes that might befall us. We thought of preparation as a specific against those catastrophes. If only we could precisely envision the upcoming tragedy, we could take steps to avoid it.

This is known as "the illusion of control." There's a lot of that going around. There are people who really, really don't want to die. I have often wondered whether the current fascination with healthy food wasn't just the Boomers' fear of death leaking into the marketplace.

Go eat kale and live forever. Death quails at kale. I'm eating so many vegetables I'm actually getting younger. Ha!

Yeah, well, no. Healthy eating and a healthy lifestyle will help you live longer, which means dying later, which is a boon unless (of course) it isn't. I worry about the 90-year-olds among us, running out of sentient friends and talking mainly to ghosts.

But a 90-year-old would need a new toaster, I would think, especially one that hums so prettily. So maybe I am in the prime of my toaster-buying years. We shall see.

It even has a very pleasing buzzer, not too loud, with a nice tone.

Whereupon the puppy jumped into the air off all its feet at once, with a yelp of delight, and rushed at the stick, and made believe to worry jcarroll@sfchronicle.com